Saturday, August 28, 2010

Netflix vs my new MacBook Pro: Error n8156-6013

So, I recently sold my old MacBook and gathered up enough scratch for a brand new MacBook Pro.
I had upgraded my old Mac with an ultra-fast Intel SSD drive, so naturally I kept it and simply popped it into the new MacBook Pro. Everything "just worked" as I expected. I've done this before with Macs running OS X.

It is truly a beautiful thing to be able to just plop a hard drive into another Mac and have everything work perfectly and not have to set everything up again.

Every now and then, though, this can lead to strange problems. This time around Netflix gave me trouble. I kept getting "Error n8156-6013" immediately after clicking "Play". My PS3 and wife's Mac played movies just fine.

Turns out that Microsoft Silverlight (the tech that Netflix uses for streaming) creates a DRM file on your hard drive that needs to match up with your hardware exactly for the server to authenticate properly.

If you get this error after swapping or cloning your Mac hard drive, all you have to do is delete this file and restart your web browser:
/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/PlayReady/mspr.hds

http://www.kristoferbrozio.com

12 comments:

  1. You saved my ass!!! thanks :) this was such a pain in the ass and ended up messing with fonts because somebody said something somewhere but all I needed was you!

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  2. Thanks for this - solved my problem too! Much appreciated.

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  3. You're a freakin' genius. Thank you!

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  4. This is fantastic! Thank you for posting.

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  5. I wish that this worked for me. I replaced the hard drive and have had this problem ever since. Deleting that particular file has not helped.

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  6. I followed your instructions: Library/Application Support/Microsoft... but when I reached the Microsoft folder, there was no Play ready or mspr.hds to be found. However, I still am having the plug-in failure. Any suggestions? Thanks!

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  7. Make sure you are looking at the global /Library and not your user-specific ~Library folder.

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  8. What happens if you can't find the PlayReady folder cause I can't seem to find it...

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  9. i had the same problem, i have a new mac pro- i simply had to update "silverlight" and it solved the problem instantly!

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